Interview with Douglas Morseby Ann McCauley Basso

Why The Jew of Malta?I saw a production of The Jew of Malta,and I thought it was one of the most wonderful plays I'd ever seen. It was funny; it was cynical, and it was, to me, very visceral. For me, the idea that no one had ever made a film adaptation of it was astounding.Was that Seth Duerr's production with York Shakespeare Company?Yes that was Seth’s. He was little bit hamstrung in that he could only use non-union actors, which can create a lot of limitations on a production, but I'm able to use union actors, Screen Actors’ Guild actors or Actor’s Equity actors, and these are people who have a tremendous amount of stage and screen experience. The Jew of Malta has a very rich palette of characters, and you need that depth and breadth of actor to choose from.Yes, I was re-reading the review that appeared in Shakespeare Bulletin of your Everyman film; the reviewer wrote about how good the actors were in that piece.I agonize over every casting choice. I think a lot of times people have a perception of what a director does, and—of course—misperceptions abound, but besides choosing one’s material, which is the most important thing, the next most important thing directors do is cast. Once you cast, you only have so much room to work. You can't make something from nothing. You have to believe in your actor and that the actor can discover things that you never even thought were possible from the materialTell me about some of your casting choices. I know Seth Duerr is playing Barabas.Seth is brilliant. He's a brilliant actor; this is my third film with him. I also have Derek Smith as the governor, Ferneze. Derek was nominated for a Tony in the The Green Bird, and he played Scar on Broadway [in The Lion King]for many many years; he's a tremendous, tremendous talent. He plays the antagonist to Barabas’s protagonist, or antihero. I don't see him as a tragic hero, although he goes down almost victorious, I don't know if he's tragic in the way that we perceive tragic villains. I don't shed a tear for him; he goes down defiant, and he causes as much death and destruction on the way as he can.Some people see Barabas as a Vice or a Machiavel.I like to see him as Hannibal Lecter; that helps me understand him. He is a psychopath and a serial killer; there’s no question about that. Through the course of the play he murders forty nuns; he murders his own daughter; he strangles one friar; he frames another for the murder; he poisons three people. There is nothing this man won’t do, and when he gets to that long speech listing his crimes, some people argue that he is just exaggerating, but if you look at what he accomplishes in the course of one month; it’s very clear that he is a force of nature.In your screenplay; you specify that Mathias is kind of young, a lanky looking boy and Lodowick is a bit more arrogant, sort of smarmy. How about Ithamore; what kind of actor do you have for him?That’s been a tough one to call. It’s weird because he is not so bright, and he's easily manipulated. But casting a not-so-bright actor is not the greatest of ideas. You want to find someone who is very intelligent that's going to bring a lot to the role and figure out how to deal with that. Also, I've been trying to do a very multicultural cast, far even beyond what the play suggests. I made the decision to cast Ithamore not quite by the racial type that I would've preferred. I'm casting a young Jewish guy in the role of someone who was born in Thrace or Greece or somewhere in the Mediterranean. This guy does sort have that look, and with a little bit of makeup and the right accent, no one will know the difference. However for the part of Calymath, I really want to go with people who have roots in that part of the world, and for our Machievel, I cast someone who is Italian and will perform the Machiavelli speech in Italian. I just think that's a much more interesting approach to take to it to it then something more straightforward.He's giving the speech in Italian? So are you going to subtitle it?Absolutely, yes; it will really give you a sense of where you are in the world, what's going on, and to establish the approach we’re taking with the play. Bellamira is going to be from Spain; obviously Del Bosco is from Spain; we're thinking of making Pilia-Borza maybe from West Africa. We are going to play around with where he's from. He's also an outsider, so he's going to be a person of color. The Friars, the Court, Ferneze, they’ll all be Caucasian. We are creating a very multicultural world. Malta is a rock in the middle of the Mediterranean. I don't know that anyone was born there; I guess there are native Maltese, but certainly in the play—and I think in real life—most of the people come from all over.Can you talk about your approach to the language?Ultimately, if this is an educational piece, and it's going to be used in university classrooms and seen at workshops, conferences, and seminars, the language has to still be crystal clear. The performers must understand the meter of the piece; they must be able to enunciate; they must know where the stresses are, and there's a lot of information in the text about where those stresses come. I went back to the quarto to actually work on the screenplay and was very faithful to the original spelling, the original punctuation, the original capitalization, the italics, everything. I was very, very faithful to that, thinking that it could give clues to the actors about how to work their way through the speech.There’s one speech I think is hilarious. Ithamore gives one the most beautiful speeches, one of the most poetic speeches when he talks about his fantasy life with Bellamira; I was very, very moved by that. This base-born slave has a dream, and it’s beautiful language. Of course I'm going to undercut that by having her take care of his sexual needs while he’s waxing poetic, because that's how they're manipulating him. They are manipulating him through sex to get the money from Barabas.Many people, especially non-Marlovians, seem to think that this play is very anti-Semitic, even more so than the claims against The Merchant of Venice. What would you say to that?What Marlowe has done has taken the archetype of a medieval Jew and all of the fears: Christ killers, murderers, usurers, and he's packaged it all into this one character of Barabas. Now the reason I don't find it anti-Semitic is that Marlowe is not a Christian. He is an atheist, there is not even a Christian character in the play that he doesn't bundle up into their resonant stereotypes. Their hypocrisy is unparalleled; their greed is unparalleled; these are the negative stereotypes of Christians. The friars are trying to get the most money for their order, of the governor, who will make an alliance and betray the people with whom he's allied. Marlowe does the same thing with the Turks, depicting everything you can imagine about a Turk being bloodthirsty, waging war, and capturing slaves. All of these people are stereotypes, and Marlowe is too smart and too interesting to know that they're not. He knows these are stereotypes and he's making fun of the stereotypes. He's poking fun at the audience for believing them or the ones that do believe them. To label the play as anti-Semitic would not be understanding the play as a whole or Marlowe's point of view as a playwright as a whole. You directed a successful film version of The Summoning for Everyman. One of the most difficult things must have been the very long speeches; you have some of those in The Jew of Malta. How do you plan to handle them as far as breaking them up; what are you going to do visually with those long speeches?That is really a good question, and I'm still discussing it with my cinematographer. With Everyman I came to a very clear visual style because Everyman is searching and restless and those are long speeches. He would be walking and we would be moving the camera. Marlowe is much different in that his play is more dramatic; instead in Everyman a lot of his struggle is internal. Those are the parts that we definitely have to deal with visually. The interactions with the various people Everyman meets on his journey are still not as dramatic as a typical scene, and you need to find ways to make it a little more bit more visual. For Marlowe, I am trying to work out what I'm going to do. I have this huge advantage of having amazing actors. That will go a long way toward solving the problem because it means that if these actors are as good as I know they are, then you'll be able to just watch them. It's a cliché, but their face will be the landscape.Your vision is very clear in the screenplay; can you translate that vision to the screen on your current budget?I don't know. I really don't know what we can do; we are working very hard right now to raise money. And by the time this article is released it will still be very helpful for people to pre-purchase a DVD at a huge discount price if they go to our website, JewofMalta.com to prepurchase a DVD. What's going to happen is that if we do run over the overrun will go to credit card and the advantage for people to purchase the DVD is to help support the project. They’ll be able to get the DVD for $100 bucks rather than the $350 that it will eventually sell for; that’s an amazing deal for people. It also means that if we have any additional effects that we want to put into the movie, we will be able to. If we got enough people to support the movie we could hire a digital effects person. I can edit the film myself but I won't be able to to do the digital effects; I will have to hire a specialist. All those galleys of the Turks, whatever it is, we need more funding to do it right.

I'm thinking about the Hannibal Lecter thing you said before. In Hannibal, not so much in the movie but in the book, the reader starts to like him a little bit. We start to get into his head a little bit and not exactly sympathize, but to understand him somewhat.Seth and I have talked about the points where we might be able to humanize him. With Shylock it’s so easy to humanize him because that's what Shakespeare does brilliantly. He takes this man that is going to do this monstrous thing and cut someone's heart out in a courtroom but you understand why. He is broken by the loss of his daughter. Shylock speaks so beautifully and painfully about all of that; it's very clear why he is who he is. Barabas is just not that guy.So do you have any ideas of how you going to humanize him?No. I used to think it was important. I don't know if it's important anymore. There's a moment when Ithamore asks Barabas if he regrets the loss of his daughter and Seth is counterplaying it. In other words, Barabas says, “no.” Seth is playing against that; his “no” is obviously a lie; there's subtext there. I suspect--I could be wrong. I don't know there is subtext there. I think I'm going to have the ask Seth to do it like he doesn't care, but honestly I don't know what the correct reading of the line is; I have to think about it. And I don't know what's going to play better but it's very clear from the beginning of the play, and this is what I've been working with Seth on, that Barabas knows she wants to marry Mathias, and he's a Christian, therefore she would become a Christian. He already knows that he's going to make sure that this marriage never happens. He'll either destroy Matthias, or he'll destroy her before he sees her become a Christian, and that's very clear from the beginning of the play. I think you need to know that as the director and as an actor, because there is evidence for it, but you need to know going in that there is no way he would ever allow this to happen, and he’d be willing to kill his daughter. In fact he does kill his daughter because she converts to Christianity.What about textual cuts or transpositions?No, I won't make any cuts for a couple of reasons. One, this is an educational piece designed for people to use in a university environment, and I think you need to present the entire play. The second reason is that people who make cuts don't know what they're missing. In other words, Marlowe may intend something that we can look at on the page and not understand. Then when it is finally filmed and cut and put into the piece, I could think, “How could I have ever thought of cutting this?” With Everyman, I got a lot of pressure to cut Everyman's repetitive soliloquies, and I said no, we’re not going to cut them for the same two reasons. We needed academic integrity, and also I couldn't be sure why they were there. I had to see, and what I discovered was that Everyman's repetition was a way for him to come to grips with what he was facing. It's a rhetorical device, kind of like the child going through these steps again and again saying it again and again, “why not, why not, why not?” It's his process of coming to terms with what he's going through and if you were to cut them down or cut them out, you would lose that journey, and you would certainly lose the rhythm of the play. It would take a more linear approach. It's already a very linear play, but it would come even more so, and I don't think it would be nearly as effective.When do you start filming?May 9th. We had to move our shoot schedule earlier to accommodate Derek Smith because he's off to play Antonio in The Merchant of Venice in DC. He played Scar on Broadway in The Lion King for many years, and you don't get to play Scar on Broadway unless you're brilliant. You just don't. You just can't.